Monthly Archives: April 2010

Here’s what caught my eye when I finally picked up the old RSS feeds this week.

I will not call this a “fish story.” While overfishing is (un)naturally selecting most species for smaller body size, tournament marlins (which are only fished for sport) have gotten bigger over the last fifty years. (Southern Fried Science

Not a neutral question. The number of species in a community may determine whether the makeup of that community is more due to chance, or the competitive ability of its members. (The EEB & flow)

You can always do better than nothing. Just a single tree in the middle of an agricultural field can boost the diversity of birds and bats found in the area. (Conservation Maven)

Well, it is an earthworm. Scientists at my own University of Idaho have captured specimens of the Palouse Giant Earthworm, which hasn’t been seen since 2005. It turns out to be somewhat less than giant. (NPR)

Things that happened while I was in the middle of the Nevada desert harassing Joshua trees:

I had two of my first-author manuscripts accepted for publication. One, reconstructing the characteristics of yucca moths before they became yucca moths [PDF], will appear in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society; the other, a review of what we know (and don’t know) about how ecological processes create adaptive radiation [PDF], will be in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Needless to say, I’m very pleased. I’ll discuss each paper in more detail when they’re posted to the respective journal websites.

Apparently the revolution finally came, and we are now living in a socialist worker’s paradise in which pre-existing conditions are illegal and 26-year-olds can use their parents’ health insurance. I, for one, am totally excited to get my new Mao jacket.

So another field season came to a close Friday, and after a 1,000-mile drive from Nevada, I’m in Salem for the week, tying up loose ends and getting ready for the Evo-WIBO 2010 meeting next weekend. I’ll probably write up something in greater detail—and announce D&T’s first special series of posts—in the next few days, but for now, here’s my final set of field season photos.